1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a mobile communication terminal, and more particularly, to a method for managing multimedia data in a mobile communication terminal and a mobile communication terminal therefor.
2. Description of the Related Art
In line with the commercialization of mobile communication terminals, the mobile terminals have a variety of additional functions as well as the basic call function. Many popular functions among the additional functions, such as a photographing function based on a digital camera, a music playback function, and a video playback function, have been provided in the mobile communication terminals. Accordingly, the mobile communication terminals can support a Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) that sends and receives as contents associated with the above additional functions as messages.
MMS is a wireless data communication scheme in the form of a wireless mail system that 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has established to support Person-to-Person delivery of multimedia messages in the 3rd Generation (3G) wireless Internet environments. The MMS provides a wireless multimedia message service method extended to wire/wireless networks, so as to deliver and output every kind of media, including text, audio, image and video, to MMS agents. Thus, contents contained in multimedia messages that are sent/received using MMS may include text, image, video, sound source, etc. In the following description, every content-related data that is included in multimedia messages and delivered by MMS will be called ‘multimedia data.’
Generally, in order for a mobile communication terminal to send a multimedia message using MMS, a sending mobile communication terminal first composes a multimedia message with multimedia data attached, and sends the composed multimedia message.
After the sending mobile communication terminal sends the multimedia message, the sent multimedia message is automatically stored in a Sent box (or a Sent Message box) in the sending terminal.
In most cases, the multimedia data attached to the multimedia message stored in the Sent box may be a copy of the multimedia data previously stored in a memory of the mobile communication terminal. The multimedia data is large in capacity compared with text messages of the mobile communication terminal, because it generally includes an image or video data. Therefore, if many multimedia messages are stored in the Sent box, they may occupy a large amount of storage in the mobile communication terminal, causing unnecessary waste of the storage due to the duplicate multimedia data.